The Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century.

The argument of The Return of the Real rests on a series of assumptions now familiar in the work of what Hal Foster himself calls the academy - that body of art critics and art historians for whom New York is the center of the world. The first assumption is that the proper objects of contemporary criticism are not stable artistic entities definable in terms of intrinsic properties, but rather those forms of "placement" or "displacement" through which art's past, however recent, comes to be framed. The second assumption is that this mode of criticism is justified by a turn within the practice of art itself: a turn, as Foster defines it, from "interstitial 'text' to institutional 'frame.'" In other words, to the extent that the practice of art has itself become a practice of cultural studies, it is fitting for critical writing to proceed as though works of art had no significant existence independent of its purview.

"Displacement" gets a special value by reference to the Freudian concept of "deferred action." Foster's argument is that the traumatic effect of avant-garde activity is only fully registered in subsequent workings out. This is the burden of the first of his seven chapters, and it is reprised in the fifth, in a sustained and well-written analogy on Andy Warhol's early "Death in America" images. His avowed ambition is to see this Freudian revision established in principle "for modernist studies at the end of the century." His more specific aim, however, is to save the "neo-avant-garde" of the '50s and '60s from the condemnations of Peter Burger. In his Theory of the Avant-Garde (1974; English translation 1984), Burger claimed that while the Dada, Surrealist, and Constructivist avant-gardes of the early twentieth century were engaged in motivated critiques of the institution of art, the activities of the postwar avant-gardes were merely so many forms of repetition serving to institutionalize the legacy of avant-gardism itself. For Foster, following Lacan, "Repetition is not reproduction." His counterclaim, then, is that the return of avant-gardism is not mere reenactment, but rather a traumatic form of critical enactment. Once established with regard to the neo-Dada art of the late '50s and '60s (Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Allan Kaprow, Yves Klein, and Piero Manzoni), this claim provides a methodological base from which to carry the process of recuperation forward, through the "Crux of Minimalism," into the late '60s and early '70s (Daniel Buren, Hans Haacke, Marcel Broodthaers, and Michael Asher), and thence into the late '80s and early '90s (Sherrie Levine, Robert Gober, Louise Lawler, Silvia Kolbowski, Christopher Williams, and Andrea Fraser). For it is of course the "avant-garde at the end of the century" that Foster aims finally to legitimate.

Crudely paraphrased, his argument is that a progressive avant-garde dissolution of art's traditional media has made possible an intensifying engagement with "actual bodies" and "social sites" and thus an effective realization of those institutional critiques that were repressed in earlier phases of avant-gardism. Hence the "Return of the Real." It turns out that the realization in question - the deferred enactment, that is, of the supposedly failed institutional critique of the historical avant-garde - is "the contestation of formalist modernism." Unfortunately, the device of replacing modernist or Marxist concepts of historical self-criticism with Freudian concepts of repetition does not itself overcome the dangers of historicism. For all the self-consciously postmodernist critiques of modernist concepts of progress - customary calls for "different models of causality, temporality, and narrativity" - the teleological character of Foster's argument remains clear. Wherever his own narrative may be thought to start, and however "lateral" its movements, there's no mistaking either its trajectory or its destination. Put to sleep in the traumatic second decade of the twentieth century, the spirit of avant-gardism is reawakened to its critical task: the storming of "Modernist Painting." Where but in New York?

In proposing to correct Burger's dismissal of the neo-avant-garde, Foster implicitly accepts that definition of the historical avant-garde on which Burger's account is itself based: one in which it is the Duchampian readymade, rather than, say, Picasso's Cubism, that furnishes the "primary device." The status thus accorded the readymade marks a third foundational assumption. For the Clement Greenberg of "Avant-Garde and Kitsch," culturally advanced work identified itself as such in intensional (qualitative) terms. It was through its very originality and unrepeatability that the work of art evaded conscription to the ends of capital. For Burger and for Foster, on the other hand, the critical power of the avant-garde is rather to be found in its rearranging of extensional (quantitative) categories, through processes of mimicry, of infiltration, and of replacement. Foster's critical faculties are not noticeably engaged by any qualitative difference between one comparable work and another, but he shuffles categories of work like cards in his rhetorical pack.

That Burger finally furnished a graspable model of the avant-garde to set against Greenberg's was always a prime reason for the academy's interest in his work. The arguments of "Avant-Garde and Kitsch" rested on a distinction between high art and popular culture that was not simply radical but in fine ethical (in the sense that bad taste may be thought unethical). This smacked of elitism - particularly to those who found their own enthusiasm disparaged in the analysis. What was required was a concept of avant-gardism - better still, a present avant-garde - that could be reconciled with transgression of the class boundaries dividing the modern media.

By the later '50s there were plenty of places to look, including some European forms of neo-Dadaism and Pop art that predated - though did not outshine - the American varieties. Foster correctly identifies the Minimalism of the '60s as the crucial "site" of a "general return" of the (Duchampian) avant-garde. It nevertheless took a while finally to dissociate avant-gardism from the medium specificity of Modernist high art. Michael Fried fought a determined rearguard action in his "Art and Objecthood" of 1967 - an essay Foster discusses at length in his chapter on Minimalism. Even as late as April 1970, the editor of Artforum could still describe the "most exquisite triumph of the two-dimensional manner" - from Cubism, through Jackson Pollock, to Kenneth Noland, Jules Olitski, and Frank Stella - as a narrative that students "run through . . . by rote."

Since then, though, the authority of the Modernist canon has been under sustained assault. Nowadays the academy is pushing at an open door - as academics are wont to do. For today's students the standard narrative is the one that charts Foster's various avant-garde phases. The canonical status of Duchamp's work is as securely established as Picasso's or Matisse's was in the past. Versions of the institutional theory of aesthetics are recited as though no sensible person could gainsay them, while those who have never read Greenberg assume they have disposed of his arguments. It's not because I take Foster's foundational assumptions to be controversial that I have rendered them explicit. On the contrary, it's because they have come to be the building blocks of an unexamined common sense.

This is not to say that Foster's text is easy to assimilate. If his account of the twentieth century rests on a now-conventional armature, its application to the art of the past twenty years is wreathed in theoretical entanglements. These are not all of his own making. He points with justice to "a connection between structural linguistics and high-modernism on the one hand, and post-structural semiotics and postmodernism on the other," and asks, conscientiously enough, "But what makes these connections?" The problem is that once the question has been posed in these terms, those rashly volunteering to answer court one or other form of disqualification. To suggest that it is the academy itself that makes the connections is to risk being sent to the sin bin. Yet any more decorous form of response must tangle with a highly specialized intellectual apparatus, and it is one in which the academy has developed an intimidating expertise. Foster's third chapter is devoted to an analysis of the postmodernist "Passion of the Sign." It's revealing of the character of his prose that quotations from Barthes and from Derrida appear light and limpid within it. "Sometimes," the chapter concludes, "this passion, this fetishism, made it difficult to distinguish, among post-modernist artists and poststructuralist critics alike, between critics of the reifications and fragmentation of the sign and connoisseurs of this same process." True to his own words, the figure of the connoisseur as postmodernist professor haunts the margins of Foster's text.

As he nonetheless acknowledges, one robust and well-rehearsed answer to the rhetorical question is that it is capital that makes the connections. To adopt this explanation, however, is to accept some material limit to the proliferation of theory. Given his self-image as an intellectual of the left, Foster is bound to oppose what he calls the "work of retroversion so pervasive in culture and politics today . . . the reactionary undoing of the progressive transformations of the century." And he can hardly ignore the evidence that that retroversion has involved the disconnection of artistic avant-gardism from the critique of capitalism and its agencies and effects. It is natural, therefore, that he should be made uneasy by the apparent opportunism and complicity of the New York avant-garde of the '80s, and that he should narrate its demise with satisfaction: "simulation painting and commodity sculpture were forms of salon portraiture, and when the market fell in 1987 and the collectors withdrew, these forms declined too." In the sequence of the book, it is this decline that opens the way for the return of the real. And yet it transpires that what secures the authenticity of this "real" is not its critical position with regard to simulation or mere reproduction, but rather its status as "a thing of trauma." After Warhol, the major figure canvased is Cindy Sherman, whose work ushers in a discussion of "the artifice of abjection." In what follows - Mike Kelley's dirty toys, John Miller's shit-smeared models - it is the etiology of personal rather than social dysfunction that gets accorded a fascinating iconography. We look in vain for any indication of the credibility of socialism, to which the critique of capital sometimes conduced in the past.

"Trauma discourse" is one of the two major preoccupations of Foster's "avant-garde at the end of the century." The second is "the ethnographic turn in contemporary art and criticism." Assembled under the banner of the "Artist as Ethnographer," we encounter the various interests of cultural studies at the cutting edge: anthropology "prized as the science of alterity"; culture itself defined as an ever-expanding field of reference; the "contextual" and the "interdisciplinary" accorded priority over the formal and the medium-specific; and self-criticism conceived as leading not (like the Greenbergian exercise of taste) to a sharper discrimination of the intensional properties of the art object, but rather (like the Rortyan practice of democracy) to a more liberal orientation of the viewpoint of the observer.

Ironically, it's just this liberal concept of self-criticism that limits the scope of Foster's book. For what it lacks is any sense of the resistance objects conceivable as artistic might present to its own viewpoint and framing powers. In the world it surveys, art world and academy merge imperceptibly but indissolubly into a single agency, so that no distinction can any longer be made between a work and its art-historical encapsulation, between intensional character and cultural symptomaticness, between production and ethnography. In consequence the book is fraught with the contradiction that any left-leaning art criticism or art history must sustain if it allows works of art no properties independent of the discourses that represent them: whatever its emancipatory pretensions, the effect of its articulation of these discourses is to suggest that one cannot know a work of art without being in the know. And as Foster's text demonstrates, being in the know is arduous work, largely to be done in bookstores and libraries. He acknowledges as much: "the horizontal expansion of art has placed an enormous burden on artists and viewers alike: as one moves from project to project, one must learn the discursive breadth as well as the historical depth of many different representations - like an anthropologist who enters a new culture with each new exhibition." What this book sorely needs is a convincing explanation of why anyone might want to take on this burden in the first place - anyone, that is, who does not already have a stake in the academy to defend or to advance. As an honest enterprise in support of avant-gardism, The Return of the Real is surely a work with its heart in the right place. But it needs to be remembered how small the world is in which the examples it draws on are the ones that come to mind.

Charles Harrison is professor of history and theory of art at the Open University, England. He is currently at work on two books: Modernism (Tate Gallery, London) and Art in Theory 1820 to 1900 (Blackwell), both to be published in 1997.